It's available in survival, I'm not sure about creative (it's tied to the food bar, so if there's no food bar in creative then you might not be able to sprint). You have to tap the forward key once then hold it down, which took me a little while to figure out as I was trying to tap the key repeatedly, which just made the camera go weird.

I really like the fact that Notch has rised the cloud layer up to the highest level of the sky. No more clouds floating through our towers and mountaintop homes.

Still a few bugs to be found. I've had immovable wood blocks appear on my floor and in my inventory, as well as a few game crashes. but thats to be expected. Its actually amazing how relatively bug free its been.

Can't wait til the server is updated with the official version. Its amazing how lonely singleplayer feels after you've played with friends.

*Edit: Hehheh. Just discovered that with a fully charged bow, you can one-hit kill a Ghast. Be vewy, vewy quiet...

As you can see, snow and ice aren't implemented yet, but look at the size of those oceans. That one on the bottom left must be at least 75km²!

Speaking of which, I generated a new world earlier and found myself on a small island with a single tree and all I could see around me were two other treeless islands. This should provide me with an interesting challenge until 1.8 is released proper.

Hunger makes the survival aspect of the game much more interesting. I was playing around with that world I mentioned earlier where I spawned on a small island, and I tried to get a wheat farm up and running, but the wheat was growing too slowly and my food bar was nearly at the bottom after a few days. Thankfully, I found a spider one morning, killed it, made the string into a fishing rod and now I have a supply of delicious fish and the occasional loaf of bread. These small island starts are great, it's like playing a randomly generated survival challenge map.

I found the recipe for glass panes. It's pretty much the same as for fences, but with glass cubes instead of sticks. It creates 16 of them, which (considering that panes can be picked back up again) makes it a lot more efficient for large glass projects than cubes.

Did anyone notice that animals are now permanent (and finite)? No animals were spawning on my island so I went to a nearby landmass and sheared some sheep so I could make a bed. When I passed through that area again about an hour later I saw shorn sheep running through the land. To test this, I collected a bunch of eggs left by chickens in that area, brought them back to my island, built a pen and threw the eggs until a chicken popped out. The chicken never despawns. I even left the island for half an hour once and when I came back the chicken was still in its pen. It seems like the new passive mob spawn mechanism is in 1.8 even though mobs can't breed until 1.9. (You can kind of breed chickens by throwing eggs though.)

It might be wise to survive on a diet of bread and fish until 1.9 comes out, otherwise we may drive the all the animals to extinction.

Hmmm, and according to rumor, the official release of 1.8 is on Monday.

And I did notice the sheep stayed sheered. Well good. Maybe it'll cut down on folks running around killing animals for lulz.
And of course it teache skids about the need for a balanced diet. (one serving from the pork group, one from the mushroom group, one from the bread group...)

I'll be so glad when I have my main computer back and can play this again. I've got company for all of this week (and last week) and they've taken over my computer because I'm too nice to make them use my evil, evil netbook.

But this might work out fine, if 1.8 is released today. By the time I get my computer back, we should be up to 1.8_12 or something.

I'm especially happy about that last one. One thing I'm unhappy about currently is that the deepr you go, the darker it is. My giant underground mine now looks like this, despite loads of torches and the brightness setting turned all the way up.

it's kind of funny on the minecraft forums the amount of sulking going on because 1.8 has been delayed. I often wonder sometimes if people forget that the game is still in beta and is not yet a finished game, or the fact that the pre-release has thrown up some bugs that are or have been fixed.
still makes me chuckle at the posts of 'I'm going to delete mine craft blah blah blah'

me, i'm looking forwards to 1.8 but i'd rather wait until they've got it sorted out first. i've always got other games to play things to do